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Christmas is long gone and I’m back in Middlesbrough after a refreshing break. The first thing I had to focus on when I got back was to create a presentation for Advanced Visual Effects where we were to present a storyboard, previs, schedule and a couple of other things regarding the ICA. As I still [...]

At long last, the project is almost over. Less than two days away as of this writing. After delivering the final film a couple of weeks ago, I’ve spent my time relaxing, creating a short “making of” with the rest of Green Spill, writing stuff on this blog and a self assessment document. The self [...]

Having finished rendering and vfx shots, and with a little more than a week to deadline, compositing was next on the list. Beforehand, I had estimated compositing would take a day or two. I had already test comped nearly one third of the shots and thought I could use those as templates for the rest. [...]

With less than three weeks left of the project, animation was finished to a point where I could start adding fire and smoke to finished shots. Having used FumeFX in the past, it became the natural choice now.
I anticipated this to be a fairly simple task, but didn’t have to work long before it became [...]

Well, technically it’s been finished for a week now, I’ve just been too fed up to blog about it until now. The past month has been incredibly busy and seeing as my field, post production, comes last (who would have thought?), I haven’t been sleeping that much lately. Lack of sleep coupled with missed deadlines [...]

Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, right? Or so a guy called Murphy felt and it’s become uncomfortably true lately.
During rendering of the final movie we’ve had to re-render scenes due to lighting problems, texturing problems, last minute texture changes, render errors and plugin incompatibilities. In addition we still have issues with FumeFX and VRayPhysicalCamera [...]

So we’re finally at the animation stage. Or have been for the past few days. To get the most out of the remaining time, Andreas, Aleksander and Jamie are chipping away on the shots while I render them out and take them through compositing.
As I’m the last person to touch the footage before editing, I’ve [...]

Compositing in After Effects is in many ways very similar to working in Photoshop. If you are familiar with layers, masks, blending modes and/or filters, compositing in After Effects should be a breeze.
Go to Part 1

In this tutorial I’ll take you through the process of quickly creating a textured city in 3d studio max 2009 and how you, through a few extra render passes, can go from a quite crappy render to something half-way decent using After Effects CS3. If all goes well, we’ll end up with a finished shot [...]

I know, I promised to post this more than a week ago, but it’s the holidays and found a few things I wanted to test before I started rendering the final shots. What happened was that I watched a most illuminating video lesson concerning motion blur and depth of field passes for Nuke made by [...]